A.G. Gancarski
Jacksonville is in for a tight budget year, and amidst pressures from community activists such as Diallo Sekou and R.L. Gundy to budget for body cameras for the beleaguered Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, some provisional good news came through in a letter from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement last week.
The FDLE received an appropriation of $250,000 in state pass-through funding for body cameras for fiscal year 2016-17, and the sheriff’s office got a solicitation letter for the grant application last week.
Programmatic performance reports are a condition of payment, the letter asserted.
Of the $17 million requested increase in the JSO budget for this year, $9.3 million are associated with pension costs. The enhancements, meanwhile, are driven by outmoded equipment: Tasers at the end of their usable lives; an outmoded Computer Aided Dispatch system; faulty laptops in patrol cars; helicopters that are also aged, with one dating back to the Vietnam War era.
Will $250,000 be enough for a provisional rollout?
A pilot program, discussed in a Florida Times-Union article, would encompass 5 percent of the up to $5 million cost for cameras. There also would be recurring costs and impacts for data collection as well.
